


Aberglaube

by hophophop



Series: Things Said & Unsaid [4]
Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-14
Updated: 2014-12-14
Packaged: 2018-03-01 11:36:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2771579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hophophop/pseuds/hophophop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>"One mystery at a time, detective."</em> </p><p><strong>aberglaube</strong>: belief in things beyond the certain and verifiable </p><p>...once these loose threads were cauterized, he and Watson would go back to how they’d been before that ass invited himself to dinner.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aberglaube

**Author's Note:**

> Starts during 2x23 and continues into the hiatus.

Holmes unbuttoned his collar and let lose a long sigh as he slumped on the couch in his room. He’d heard the shower run briefly an hour ago but nothing from the second floor since. The brownstone’s solid presence felt like home again, no longer the baleful vacant shell of the past two days. Mycroft’s noxious fumes were finally dissipating now that his goons had escorted him back to their lair. They’d have to meet once more for the debrief with the handler, but the end was in sight: once these loose threads were cauterized, he and Watson would go back to how they’d been before that ass invited himself to dinner. Finally the long-postponed experiments interrupted by the drone case could continue, and Watson… Well she would find a project of her own. He had no interest in managing her life or directing how she spent her time.

He’d been given a double reprieve, that she wasn’t… He cleared his throat and abruptly stood up to shuck off his stale clothes for something less binding to rest in. He settled back down in sweat pants and t-shirt, unwilling to risk disturbing Watson’s much-needed rest by running a bath. She wasn’t harmed, and she was no longer entangled with Mycroft. He hadn’t realized just how deep his resentment reached until it was clear that her regard for his brother did not survive the kidnapping. He’d wanted to cheer at the cold glance she leveled on her way out of the library; the rush of vindication he’d felt was almost intoxicating. Or would have been, if he hadn't been staring at the open sore who prompted it.

It had been infuriating and utterly irrational, that she should entertain Mycroft’s inane company willingly. The conundrum was where to lay the blame. He could hardly absolve Watson of all responsibility; she was unquestionably her own woman and under no one’s sway, and Mycroft never exerted himself for anything or anyone. But neither could he deny the symmetry of turnabout, as Mycroft would undoubtedly see it: he’d shown that Mycroft’s fiancee was compromised and so Mycroft attempted the same with his partner. Except of course the relationships could not be more different, and anyone who was not a nit would have seen that. So Mycroft’s point was as far off mark as it could have been, if indeed he had ensnared Watson’s regard out of insipid sibling rivalry. No question that’s how it began, in any case. But how it continued, with Watson’s approbation, he couldn’t comprehend at all.

No matter. The veils torn by deceit and criminal negligence exposed Mycroft’s flaws, and she was free of whatever lure had captured her interest. And therefore he was free of it, too. She would need time to regain her equilibrium, of course. Perhaps require psychological support; reading between the lines of the banal incident reports he’d tasked Everyone to obtain, the body count was rather high, and she might have…lingering qualms. But once she was through with that, they would resume the work unhindered.

Watson could be very hard on herself, he knew, and perhaps felt responsible for believing in Mycroft and even for Le Milieu’s subsequent actions. Some gentle reassurance of her worth might be necessary. Her value to him. It had been intolerable, standing there facing the abyss of Watson — his Watson! — in harm’s way with only the inadequate presence of Mycroft as both instigator and sole source of help. His brother’s words scraped inside his ribs still, that damned scrap of insight he managed to glean, somehow. Worming his way into his thoughts, about himself, what he was capable of, what he owed to others. Mycroft was a snake in the grass, he’d known that since they were children, and he should never have let Watson persuade him or herself of anything but.

Of course the culpability for Le Milieu’s violation was Mycroft’s…Mycroft’s and his own.

The person he loves most in the world. He grimaced, shifting on the couch to get comfortable. He detested the word for its imprecision and the endless array of misunderstandings it promulgated. Nevertheless, he couldn’t refute the statement any more than he could believe the converse was true. Not that it mattered; she had other people in her life she could love; she didn’t look to him to meet such needs. He was simply relieved that they weren’t going to be met by Mycroft.

*

He went to Mycroft’s Kensington flat before their father’s agents cleared it out, with the intent of transferring a few things to the echoing empty caverns of 221B. In a fit of ridiculous guilt-driven sentimentality he took the box of mementos from before Mycroft went to university, the desk and its contents, and a pair of armchairs he remembered from childhood and didn’t hate with the vitriol generally inspired by other things from that era of his life. A skim of the bookshelves identified little of interest as they clearly were populated by an interior decorator, but an 1850 atlas of London and the first-edition, two-volume, compact _Oxford_ might provide distraction in a dull moment.

Mycroft’s school-dictated letters home had regularly included a word-of-the-day instruction to his little brother. Carefully copied out entries from the _Oxford English Dictionary_ selected to highlight and explicate his sibling’s faults. Obstreperous. Weffe. Strange (all twenty-six meanings and sub-meanings). Aberglaube. That last which was pure slander, obviously, as he’d never been guilty of any such thing. A fact all too well demonstrated by the situation he found himself in now. It was good: He was far better off not relying on faith.

He pulled the first oversized volume from its slipcase, and a single sheet slipped out with it and fluttered to the floor, landing blank-side up. It appeared to be a photograph, and he hesitated before bending down to collect it. Turning it over was suddenly like being there again. A bright, cool, sunny day in early fall; a scattered few yellowing leaves on the tree-covered hills and green grass still in the pastures. Woodsmoke in the air, and not a cloud in the sky. A horse and rider in the paddock behind them cantered around and around, finessing their inter-species communication as the circles got smaller. He couldn’t tell if he felt the vibration through the ground or his ears, but the faint triple hoofbeat had matched his heart rate.

In the center of the photograph, the grey barn behind them, a pair of consulting detectives. They were side-by-side, heads bent over something….The record of the medications Nigella’s horse was supposed to be taking, he recalled. One last check of the details after they found the missing-finger handprint on the tree and before they headed back to the city to put the pieces together. Mycroft must have captured them with his phone. But that he bothered at all, and saved it, and then had the image printed on photo stock…?

A picture of Watson alone would make some unsavory sense he didn’t like to think of. But of both of them, together? He didn’t know what to think of that. In the photo, Watson was focused on the document she held, so engaged, and he had leant over to examine what she had noticed. Despite the threads he had tugged and worried at all last year until the unravelling he feared became a self-fulfilling prophecy, she _was_ with him then. He could feel the memory of it still, that irrational and unverifiable link between them, even though at the time he was certain (irrationally and without verification) it would end. And then he made it so.

He pushed the book back into the case with its pair and slipped the photo in between the two volumes until it couldn’t be seen, resting his fingers over the seam. Then he jerked the whole thing off the shelf, and the rest of the books on either side fell over with soft thuds, like giant dominoes.

*

After weeks away, Watson’s absence was present to him as few other things were, and those others best left unremarked. Every time someone didn’t inquire about her whereabouts, her interpretation of the evidence, or her opinion of his shortcomings, was a reminder. Every time he didn’t lash out at the people around him for not invoking her, was a reminder. He chided himself for this weakness, one he’d warned both of them about in the past. This learned helplessness demonstrated why he was in fact better off without a partner. He’d let sentiment and laziness blur his judgment. There was much less risk with only oneself to blame. No, not blame; trust. He meant, only oneself to rely upon. No more crutches.

> _“Where’s your shadow?” He looked up sharply, but neither of the agents standing at the edge of the rotted pier halfway finished crumbling into the Thames was Detective Bell._
> 
> _The officer took a step back and cleared her throat, pointing to the sluggish brown current. “I said, there’s a shallow. Not deep enough to hide the body bag.”_
> 
> _He pushed his irritation down but there was nowhere left for it to go._

An old conundrum: the unfortunate necessity of officially sanctioned access to the cases that needed him most, which then left him exposed to the distracting dissonance of the dullards and dolts who apparently made up the majority of law enforcement, whether NYPD, Scotland Yard, or MI6. He’d never escape it entirely, but there’d been something of a reprieve in recent years, which he hadn’t appreciated quite as much as he should. It was an abberation, more like, behind him now. Best focus on the present certainties. The quicker he solved their cases, the sooner he’d escape their drag on his senses. A day’s solitude to calm jittery nerve endings with solitude and sleep, only to wake up hours or days later once more yearning for the next puzzle. If he still had a sponsor, he suspected he’d be warned about the inherent danger in framing his work like that.

> _The loud white noise of the packed university caf left him free to concentrate on the cipher, the only useful clue extracted from the remains of a bomb site he believed to be linked to Le Milieu. It wasn’t strictly within MI6 protocols to remove evidence but if they wanted his help, they would have to make certain adjustments to their expectations._
> 
> _“Miss Watson tells me that you’re into lock picking.” This time he knew the voice from the crowd was not what it seemed, but his concentration skittered away from the code._
> 
> _“Joan’s got a sure hand,” Alfredo had told him some months later, an embarrassed but smiling Watson at his side after their latest security lesson. “Speed’s coming along too.” She fled the praise to make tea, and he watched Alfredo watch her go and then turn back to him when she was out of earshot. “You skipped three meetings this month, and I know you know that’s not how this works. What’s up?”_
> 
> _His attention jolted back to the present with the hornet buzz of his handler’s furious text about disregarding proper procedure. He deleted it and returned to the work at hand._

Through force of will, he refused to contemplate what he left behind, choosing instead to remain focused on the reasons he sought out MI6 in the first place. When that tenure concluded, the barren walls of 221B held no attraction, nor did the familiar routines of Scotland Yard. Under the scrutiny of brutal honesty, a solitary exercise he performed once a week instead of going to a meeting, he observed that the Yard was a web of tripwires and triggers, practically every corridor and cubby etched with traces of old chemical habits. Given his recent aborted self-test, he was better off without such prompts. The life of the mind he’d once explored in this flat was long since packed up, discarded, or blown to bits, and there was no palimpsest to be reconstructed under Mycroft’s pallid renovations. Nor was there Mycroft himself as a sparring partner. He made do with other ways to occupy his time and deluded himself he had reason to remain, but taking on an eager new apprentice was hardly the best method to disguise what was missing.

> _“Would you just shut up about her already?” Kitty slammed the padlock she’d failed to open on the pretentious slate countertop Mycroft had installed. “I don’t care how quickly Watson mastered lock-picking. Or single stick. Or bloody tortoise identification. She’s not here, is she? Because you wanted London and she chose New York. So stop dragging her in.”_

Kitty was right. Watson didn’t belong here, not in London. This city would always be at the core of him; it’s where he became who he was, for good and for ill, and some day he would come back to stay. But not now. He was disgusted with himself, running away to London just as he’d run to New York before, trying to escape the inescapable. The question before him now: if he went back, was that forward motion or yet another retreat from a challenge he couldn’t face? The self-pity that drove his craven exit would have been all too obvious to Watson’s trained eye. She’d have little interest in engaging with that, as demonstrated by the lack of communication since he left. Could he give her reason to work with him again? Well, of course he could; any detective worth their salt would value his involvement. It was simply a matter of demonstrating he was ready and able to resume his role. Watson would see reason. He’d taught her all he knew, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired in part by [beanarie's gifset](http://beanarie.tumblr.com/post/100164100498) and in her honor given the alternate title "SHERLY YOU'RE A TOOL GO HOME"


End file.
